Exploring the History, Literature, and Culture of the Tar Heel State
— Click away a leisurely afternoon with these 206 images of Asheville from the Library of Congress.
— “The Nylon Capital of the World… need not embellish its past with a bogus story about Leonidas Polk.”
— The distinctive architecture of Gaston County’s oldest building “came down the Great Wagon Road.”
Everything these days is green, environmentally friendly, or recycled. So, in an effort to recycle and love the environment, we are recycling a past “This Month in North Carolina History” for this month’s edition. The item was written by Harry McKown in 2004: September 1987 – The Blue Ridge Parkway.
However, there’s another good reason to recycle this article…this weekend the Parkway is celebrating its 75th anniversary. See: Blue Ridge Parkway, 1935-2010.
Iron lung — what a name. The recent reissue of “Breath: Life in the Rhythm of an Iron Lung” by Martha Mason made me wonder about other surviving iron lungs. This one sure has a curious provenance.
Even at the height of the polio epidemic, why would a “Charlotte Lifesaving Crew” need an iron lung? And why would it have wound up at the Mecklenburg Hotel?
Here’s what Anne Anderson, curator of East Carolina University’s Country Doctor Museum in Bailey, has to offer:
“It is unclear how the Mecklenburg Hotel came to possess the iron lung. It was gifted to the Museum in 1998. [The hotel closed in 1975.] I believe the “Charlotte Life Saving Crew” refers not to Charlotte, N.C., but to the Charlotte Life Saving Station on Lake Ontario near Rochester, N.Y. This station was eventually taken over by the U.S. Coast Guard, and a history of the station indicates they had mobile life saving equipment at the facility. Perhaps this included the iron lung, as these respirators were known to help regulate the breathing of divers and rescue victims….
“Hand-written notes made on adhesive bandages on the exterior of the iron lung lead me to think it might have been used in a hospital setting at some point. [One message reads], ‘Please leave the light off at all times unless needed for treatment or observation.’
“Many of our older guests recognize the iron lung right away and will share stories with us about their personal, or a loved one’s, experience with polio. Alternatively, many of our youngest guests (school children) have never heard of polio and guess the iron lung is a washing machine or a tanning bed.”
“[Author Edward Eggleston] errs in saying that with Salem, witchcraft trials ended in America. Virginia held one in 1706, North Carolina in 1712 and doubtless others were held elsewhere.”
— From “Everyday Life in Early America” by David Freeman Hawke (1989)
I’m not seeing supporting evidence in either Hawke’s bibliography or Tom Peete Cross’s “Witchcraft in North Carolina” (1919). Does a Miscellany reader have the rest of the story?
“The tomb of Ulysses S. Grant on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive was closely guarded over the weekend by damyankee police who had heard that North Carolina rebels, in New York for the Notre Dame game, were planning to hoist the Confederate flag over the shrine.”
— From Time magazine, Nov. 21, 1949
— Discomposed by historical presentism, Democrats cut ties to Aycock — will Vance be next?
— Wilmington’s elegantly downscale Carolina Apartments are remembered for their part in “Blue Velvet.” I was treated to a look inside in 1996, when my wife, Dannye Romine Powell, interviewed artist Claude Howell, who not only lived there but also had been born one floor up in 1915.
— A mention in “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” ought to be legacy enough for any man, don’t you think? But there’s more.
Accepting journalism as “the first rough draft of history” (whoever first called it that) may have made me too forgiving of my lapses as a newspaperman. The cause was often simple carelessness, rather than deadline pressure. But am I being unfair to hold academics and other historians to a higher standard of precision?
I raise that question after happening to Googlebook Claude Kitchin, the Halifax County native who as Speaker of the House House majority leader memorably resisted Woodrow Wilson’s call to enter World War I.
To my surprise I turned up more than 40 books that called him “Claude Kitchen.” Among the more prominent publishers: Harper (2), Norton, Bobbs-Merrill, Houghton Mifflin and Little, Brown….
… University of Arizona Press, University of Nebraska Press, University Press of Kansas (2), University of Chicago Press, University of Arkansas Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, Princeton University Press, Texas A&M University Press and… University of North Carolina Press (4).
Is Kitchin that troublesome a name? Is fact-checking that neglected a part of publishing?
During a routine reference request I came across this charming but unidentified image from the Ingatious Wadsworth Brock Collection. “Nace” Brock was a photographer in Asheville who specialized in portraiture and scenics.
Although a posed image of a mother and child, it did strike me that throughout the years many of one’s childhood memories (or perhaps just mine) center around a bicycle. Learning to ride, removing the training wheels, and the sense of freedom that cycling provides and the desire to then teach one’s own children how to ride.
The cycle continues – pun intended.
Shrimp have long been a part of life in the Onslow County town of Sneads Ferry. Since 1971 the town has celebrated its ties to the crustacean with the Sneads Ferry Shrimping Festival, held the second weekend of August. But, as in coastal communities throughout the U.S., fishing is hardly the economic backbone it once was. Residents who once depended on the sea for their living now must commute to other towns for work. And those who still haul in catches find themselves competing at the market with farm-raised seafood. Homes held by families for generations are being sold as developers move in to capitalize on a demand for beach homes.
Husband and wife team Matt and Cornelia Barr spent seven years documenting the changes brought to Sneads Ferry. Their film Wild Caught: The Life and Struggles of an American Fishing Town airs tonight at 10 on UNC-TV. The documentary has been updated since its original release in 2006.
NCM received the following announcement and wanted to share it with our readers…
The Hunter Library, in collaboration with Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual, has mounted a collection of photographs of a delegation of Cherokee craftsmen with Joan Mondale at the groundbreaking of the National Park Service’s Folk Art Center. Taken on the Blue Ridge Parkway, the photos document some of the attendees and crafts demonstrated at the 1977 event. To see the photos, go to http://craftrevival.wcu.edu and type “Mondale” into the Search box.
Craft Revival: Shaping Western North Carolina Past and Present is a project of Hunter Library at Western Carolina University. Its aim is to create a research-based website that documents an historic effort to revive handcraft in the western part of the state. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, western North Carolina craftsmen formed the cornerstone of a revived interest in things handmade to create a movement referred to as the Craft Revival. The online archival repository includes over 4,500 documents, photographs, and craft objects that are housed in the collections of regional museums, guilds, and craft schools. Hunter Library has organized these into a searchable database available via the web.